


Saith the Watchman

by laurelnose



Category: Cultist Simulator (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: Context is for the Weak, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Discussion of past violence, Fandom Blind Friendly, Forehead Touching, Gen, In Media Res, International Fanworks Day 2021, One Shot, POV Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Witcher Characters/Cultist Simulator Setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:06:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29361489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurelnose/pseuds/laurelnose
Summary: In the middle of the night, the Tragulari Geralt arrives at Yennefer’s doorstep in Port Noon. He stinks of the Wolf Divided, and he’s brought a child with him.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	Saith the Watchman

**Author's Note:**

> As something of a response to [the encouragement to write for small/underappreciated fandoms for IFWD](https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/18294), here it is: the Witcher/Cultist Simulator crossover literally nobody asked for but me! 
> 
> Technically, this is probably half incomprehensible if you haven’t played Cultist Simulator. On the other hand, having no fucking idea what is going on is part of the fundamental appeal of CultSim, so, it’s fine!! ~~I _will_ take questions and use them as an opportunity to talk at length about my headcanons for this AU.~~
> 
> TL;DR for the Witcher people: there’s a pantheon of gods called the Hours affiliated with various “principles” or themes, the followers of which are called either Long or Names if they’re particularly favored; the setting is 1920s Europe; accept everything else as a Vibe.

> _‘Mercy,’ saith the Watchman, ‘is found only in shadow.’_ – An Unmerciful Mantra

Yenna was near to finishing the notes on Hersault that Sabrina had asked her for, hunched over her drawing-room table by Lantern-light, when something pressed against her wards. The lines thrummed like a triggered spiderweb, impossible to ignore. The touch lingered just long enough that she would be sure to notice, and withdrew.

She had no idea of who would be calling on her at this hour of the night. Yenna went to her door and looked through the peephole. It was Geralt, face even more haggard than usual—oh, for fuck’s sake. She opened the door for him.

He was wearing the lightweight body armor the Tragulari favored, and he stunk of ice, like he’d been burning Winter in avalanches to make it here unscathed. At his heels was a child, dressed like a London street urchin, oversized cap obscuring its face—Yenna waved them both in, shut the door behind. Restrung her wards with an exhale.

“Geralt, what is this?”

The child and Yenna’s erstwhile lover exchanged a look, and Geralt nodded reassuringly. “My name is Cirilla Fiona Riannon,” the child said defiantly. 

She could not place it immediately, but the name sounded familiar. Sounded like _trouble_ , come to interrupt Yenna’s uneasy retirement in the Evening Isles. Yenna’s lip curled distastefully, and she plucked the child’s cap off. Waves of ashen-blonde hair tumbled out. Unlike the cap, the curtain of hair did very little to hide the child—the _girl’s_ —luminescent violet eyes.

Yenna knew the eyes of a Knock-creature when she saw them, and she whirled on Geralt.

“I owed her mother a favor,” Geralt said. 

“Her mother?”

“Pavetta Riannon.”

“This is that child?” Yenna turned back, astonished. “What happened? Why bring her here?”

Cirilla glared at her from under her hair. Yenna was not making a very positive impression on the infant Key, clearly. She sighed, waved a hand to forestall Geralt’s explanations and returned Cirilla’s cap. “No, no, don’t say now. Of course I am here to aid you, Geralt. You’re both exhausted. Let me put you up for the night and we can discuss this later.”

From the fatalistic look on Geralt’s face, he knew _later_ meant _immediately, as soon as the child is asleep_. “I appreciate it, Yen.”

“Is she always like this?” Cirilla asked in a stage whisper. Her narrowed eyes said she knew exactly how impolite it was and intended it to be so.

A fond smile broke through Geralt’s weariness. “If she wasn’t she wouldn’t be Yennefer.”

“My apologies,” Yenna said with dignity. “I can’t believe I’ve allowed myself to forget what Emily Post advises in the situation where a friend shows up in the middle of the night bearing someone else’s child. My name is Yennefer de Vengerberg; a pleasure to make your acquaintance, and so forth. I will go see to it that the beds are made up for you. Geralt, you know where the kitchen is; don’t forget to avoid the jars on the top shelf.”

Cirilla seemed greatly pacified by the mention of food, and she followed after Geralt without hesitation. Yenna drew her dressing gown closer about herself and went back to her drawing room to wake the Prophet snoozing under her desk. It flopped out of its basket to press endearingly against her ankles, sleepy, and she rubbed a thumb over the set of arms that reached up to paw at her. “The upstairs guest rooms,” she told it, “clean sheets and fresh pillows.”

It spun out of the room in a damp whirl of limbs, and, her duties as a host thus taken care of, Yenna settled in to wait for Geralt in her drawing room.

The Raw Prophet came back first, and Yenna disallowed it to clamber onto her lap. Unoffended, it retreated back to its cushion. Geralt came in a little less than an hour later and leaned heavily against the doorframe. “ _Yen_ ,” he said, the full weight of his exhaustion behind the syllable.

“Do the accommodations meet with Cirilla’s approval?” Yenna asked pleasantly.

“Ciri would be happy with a damp alley as long as nothing in it was trying to kill her, by this point,” Geralt said. He made a face, swiping the side of his boot against her carpet. The Raw Prophet had left something of a slime trail on its way out and back. “Pillows were a bit sticky, though. There’s nothing else you could summon to do the housework?”

“You’d rather I let a Caligine char all my sheets? The Prophets do their work enthusiastically. It suffices.”

Geralt made a disgruntled noise, scrubbing his hand over his face. He winced as he did so. “And you don’t do Forge-magic anyways. I remember.”

“Well, refresh _my_ memory,” she said crisply. “This is the child whose mother pressed you into preventing her from committing the Crime of the Sky? Where has she been for the past—twelve years? Thirteen? Sit down, you’re going to fall over.”

He obeyed, closing the door behind him and crossing the room to sink into the armchair she used for reading. “After I killed Pavetta, I gave Ciri to her maternal grandmother, the matriarch of one of the Societies of the Holy Wound,” he said. “I thought staying with her family, where her principle could be nurtured, would be good for her.”

Yenna’s eyebrows raised. “An entire family of adepts?”

“It’s not so uncommon. The Long aren’t to procreate, but so few adepts actually ascend. The Knowing have children all the time. The Antaeans thought that aptitude for the mystic arts was likely hereditary.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Yenna said. “It’s all so much exuviae to Ecdysiasts. And they don’t tend to pick potentials with family.”

He gazed up at her, elbows load-bearing on his knees and hands hanging between, with an expression of such sympathy Yenna couldn’t stand it, and snapped at him, “You look half-witted. If we could focus on the child who is _presently_ in danger?”

Geralt blinked, and then the corners of his mouth turned down as he said, “Her grandmother is dead. The Suppression Bureau raided their secret places. Dandelion—don’t look at me like that, Yen, I know you don’t think much of him but he has contacts in the mundane world.”

“By which you mean he’s fucking Captain Vernon Roche. Yes, I’m well aware of the great liability that is Julian Pankratz’s penchant for silver foxes.”

“Actually he reports to Sigismund Dijkstra,” Geralt said.

“He _reports_ —? I take it back. The greatest liability is Julian Pankratz’s _direct affiliation_ with the Suppression Bureau.”

“Dijkstra is using him to keep tabs on me and my mystic contacts, no doubt.” Gerald shrugged helplessly, as if there was nothing he could do to curb Dandelion’s foibles. Very likely there was not. “But if it weren’t for Dandelion giving me word, I wouldn’t have gotten Ciri out in time. He does his best to be careful.”

Yenna sighed. There was very little the Bureau could do to a Long of her caliber, but she disliked to be inconvenienced. And if anything happened, she suspected she would feel responsible for the life of Geralt’s idiot poet friend. The Bureau did not much care for traitors. She nodded at him to continue.

“I have friends in Greece. Ciri spent the last year studying with the librarian adepts at the Serapeum Peristasis.”

“I would not call anywhere _safe_ for a creature like her,” Yenna said, “but the Serapeum is well-defended and the Long tend to regard it as neutral ground.”

“Her father is still out there,” Geralt said. “He—I didn’t know. Pavetta didn’t tell me who the other Long was. But you know the Serapeum has no truck with the Sun. When he started looking for her, they wouldn’t—they wouldn’t have her anymore.”

“The Sun.” Yenna let the words hang. “Her father is old enough to have ascended before the Intercalate?”

Geralt shook his head. “Not the Sun-in-Splendour. The Sun-in-Rags. Her father is Emhyr var Emreis.”

“This is fantastic,” Yenna said. “Exactly the news I wished to receive from my lover after a vanishing act lasting for months. Does Emhyr _want_ to become an alukite?“

“Maybe he wants to remove the possibility.”

Yenna leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling, fingers still tapping. “It seems you need a Long dead. Is there a reason you did not call on the other Tragulari?”

He laughed—a humorless sound that cut off with a cough and a grimace. “I’ve read that the Dartsmen were exterminated completely in the Fifth History. That may not be the case in this History, but we aren’t much better off. Eskel’s working in Russia and Lambert had a run-in with the law and had to go to ground. Anyone else—I don’t know.”

She got up suddenly and took his hands in hers, twisting his palms up to face her. He had been favoring his hands—here was why. Frostbite in its nascency across the pads of his fingers. He had indeed had to invoke a significant power of Winter in order to come here safely.

“You had to call on the Wolf Divided,” she said.

“There was no other way to get them off our trail,” he said. Grim. Tired. She wondered if the girl had seen what the Wolf had wrought through Geralt.

Moth was not a principle of healing, but wherever the shaping of flesh was concerned, an Ecdysiast enjoyed a certain sway. Yenna pressed her thumbs hard into the centers of Geralt’s palms, ignoring his flinch, and let heart-warmth bleed back into his hands. He tried to hide his relief, as he had tried to hide his pain; Yenna saw both, and did not comment. She let go of his hands and returned to her chair.

“Emhyr must have potent followers for them to drive a trained slayer of immortals to such lengths,” she said, voice teasing. “And since there are no other Long-hunters he can call on, the great White Wolf comes to me for help. Tell me, what is an Obliviate in exile meant to do against a Name-in-the-making with the full force of his Hour’s approval behind him?”

“You’re one of the most powerful Long I know, Yen,” Geralt said. “If you’d wanted it, that Namehood could have been yours.”

“The Ring-Yew will not take me back,” Yenna said.

“Won’t she?” Geralt asked. He had an excellent poker face, but familiarity knew to interpret the inclination of his head as a smirk. 

“You know as well as I do that the Hours hold grudges for eternities,” Yenna snapped, and Geralt looked contrite.

Of course he knew that her ascension into the Mansus had not ended cleanly—he was old, like she was, and well-familiar with the House of Lethe, the Ordo Limiae, the Obliviates, those Long who did not serve a patron but instead sought to live out their immortality forgotten by the world but free from any master. He knew Long did not reject the sovereignty of the Hours lightly. But she had never told him how she herself had come to the Evening Isles. She had never told _anyone_ the full story.

Yenna shook her hair out of her face and turned her head to the pinboard of notes above her desk. Now was not the night for it. And she did not want to think about Tissaia, belly clenching at the prospect despite the intervening centuries. 

It was Geralt’s turn to get up from his chair and come take the other’s hands. “I’m not asking you to return to the Wood, Yen,” he said. Unspoken between them hung the knowledge that he had never once asked of her more than she was willing to give. “Ciri and I need a place to hide for a little while. That’s all.” 

Yenna sucked in a breath. Terrifyingly, it occurred to her that she had never once considered turning them away. 

It remained unthinkable. She could not thrust a child who had never asked to be touched by the Mansus out under the unmerciful incandescence of the quartered Sun. 

“You’re very fortunate,” she said, “that one of the Hours I still call upon is the secret-keeper the Black-Flax.”

He must have known she wouldn’t refuse him this—mustn’t he?—but the relief and gratitude on Geralt’s face was evident. He did not say anything, but pressed his forehead against Yenna’s in thanks.

She closed her eyes. Her flaw—one amongst many—was that she could never do things by halves; her agreement was her commitment.

How far might this go? Ascension had granted Yenna deeper sight, when the Laughingthrush shattered her eyes into new-seeing ommatidia, but Moth was not a principle of oracles, and she could not see the future. 

“May Moldywarp’s be the shadow you find mercy under,” she whispered. 

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on tumblr **@**[laurelnose](https://laurelnose.tumblr.com) along with [even more of this stuff](https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/tagged/cultist-simulator)


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